North American Network Operators Group

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Re: EMAIL != FTP

  • From: Albert Meyer
  • Date: Sat May 26 06:03:15 2001

At 06:18 PM 5/25/01 -0400, Steve Sobol wrote:
Apples != oranges. You can avoid reading the binaries groups, and server
admins
can refuse to carry them.

Once an e-mail is dumped in your mailbox, you can't automagically delete
it if
you are Joe Sixpack Average NetUser. You either have to go in with your
e-mail
client and download and delete it, or ask your ISP to nuke the message.

*My* experience is that people who weren't expecting the big files from
the yahoos that send it to them think their e-mail is broken until they
call
and I check their mail spool and see there's a big file (obviously the
situation
is slightly different if they were expecting the message, but there are
a lot of
times when I hear that someone's friend or relative just dumped a big
mail in
their box). Large files are an annoyance to the customer in cases like
that.
That's why the big-email dilemma is such a... well, such a dilemma. If you disallow huge emails they complain. If you allow them, they get stuck and need help. It was even worse when every 1user was using Outlook 97, which routinely choked on any email over 500K. We (my former employer) finally started charging $10 to clear out a stuck mailbox. After a time or two they would learn to use the web interface and clear it out themselves. A technical solution (like the one mentioned earlier) would be great, but it would need to work both ways, otherwise it wouldn't help until many people implemented it. Converting outgoing attachments to a link would be great, but it would also need to convert incoming attachments to a link. Incoming is the worse problem IMO. I'll add that to the list of things I plan to work on if I find myself without 60 hours/week of work that I get paid for.